THE RELICS
The Anchor
Not everything that holds us back is a prison.
Anchors are often misunderstood.
People think they exist to stop movement.
To prevent change.
To keep ships tied to a single place.
But that has never been their purpose.
An anchor is not the opposite of a journey.
It is what makes the journey possible.
Without it, every harbour becomes temporary.
Every storm becomes directionless.
Every current decides your future before you do.
That idea fascinated me long before I began writing The Tide Chronicles.
We spend much of our lives believing that freedom means cutting every rope.
Leaving.
Starting over.
Never looking back.
Yet, sooner or later, we all discover a quieter truth.
A life without roots is not freedom.
It is drift.
The Anchor became a symbol of choice.
Not obligation.
Not permanence.
Choice.
The decision to remain present when escape would be easier.
To build instead of flee.
To love despite uncertainty.
To trust despite disappointment.
In many stories, heroes are defined by movement.
They cross mountains.
Sail oceans.
Enter unknown kingdoms.
But every meaningful journey eventually asks a different question.
Where will you choose to stay?
Not because you have nowhere else to go.
Because you have finally found something worth protecting.
Perhaps that is why the sea understands anchors better than we do.
The sea never stops moving.
The waves never become still.
The tides never repeat themselves exactly.
And yet ships have always carried anchors with them.
Not to avoid the sea.
But to survive it.
Life asks the same of us.
We cannot prevent change.
We cannot negotiate with time.
We cannot stop loss from arriving at our door.
What we can choose is what remains constant within us while everything else continues to move.
That is where identity quietly begins.
The Anchor is not made of certainty.
It is made of commitment.
Commitment to values.
To memory.
To kindness.
To people.
To ourselves.
The world often celebrates speed.
Move faster.
Achieve more.
Leave before anyone leaves you.
Become someone new.
Again.
And again.
The sea has never hurried.
Neither has stone.
The oldest things in the world understand patience.
Perhaps that is why harbours feel different from open water.
Not because they are free from storms.
Because they remind us that returning is also a form of courage.
One of the questions that accompanied me while writing the novel was this:
What keeps us from becoming strangers to ourselves?
It isn’t success.
It isn’t certainty.
It isn’t perfection.
More often, it is a handful of quiet decisions repeated over many years.
The people we refuse to abandon.
The promises we continue to honour.
The compassion we choose even when no one is watching.
Those are anchors too.
Invisible.
But extraordinarily real.
There is a temptation, especially during difficult seasons of life, to believe that beginning again requires forgetting everything that came before.
I once believed that.
The sea gently proved me wrong.
Every tide returns carrying traces of distant places.
Fragments of wood.
Shells.
Salt.
Stories.
Nothing arrives untouched by where it has been.
Neither do we.
The Anchor reminds us that carrying our past is not the same as being imprisoned by it.
The difference lies in whether we choose what we carry, or whether it chooses us.
That distinction matters.
Because freedom has never meant becoming weightless.
It means deciding which weight deserves to remain.
Perhaps that is why the Anchor appears so ordinary.
Unlike crowns or swords, it was never designed to be admired.
It was designed to disappear beneath the surface, doing its work unseen.
There is something beautiful about that.
The strongest parts of our lives are often invisible.
Integrity.
Trust.
Hope.
Love.
No one applauds them every day.
Yet they quietly hold everything else in place.
Maybe we are all searching for an anchor.
Not to stop our journey.
But to remember where our heart can safely return when the sea becomes too vast.
Because every voyage needs the courage to leave.
But every soul, sooner or later, needs a place where it can finally come home.